“Whenever this happens, I can’t help asking myself—am I living in an age of flood and flame? With one plane ticket, foreign trash stomps our people like muddy boots on spring fields. Why do they get our resources, our shield, our flag’s shade? If it’s for so-called friendly ties between nations, then across the ocean, in that iron-strong country, anyone trampling their citizens wouldn’t make it three steps before bullets cut them down like lightning through a storm tree.”
“So what’s truly right? I don’t know. I only know this—when I see foreign trash bully my own, the rage burns like dry straw in a summer wind. It feels like falling back into a century of shame, like grinding our martyrs’ blood into dust under heel.”
Heron exhaled that pent-up smoke from her chest, a cloud finally leaving a sealed room.
The Zerg Maiden faced Heron—the leader who always looked calm as a winter lake—and didn’t startle at the sudden bitterness. She answered in a level voice, like rain on slate.
“Mother, even if you’re acting, at least veil your psychic ripples. As the Valkyrie sisters say, you really love that baited-hook routine.”
She had seen through Heron’s mask like seeing fish under clear water.
“Don’t be so clever, child. Bright minds draw arrows like snow draws footprints. Let me be muddle-headed once, all right? Just now I sounded like a jaded hothead. If that speech got recorded and posted on Qianji, my seat as planetary governor would tumble like a banner in a gale.”
Heron hid a laugh behind her hand, a petal on a brook. She hadn’t bothered to shroud her mental waves, but she hadn’t tried to fake them either. She’d stepped into a cynic’s skin on purpose, to see if the Zerg Maiden could taste the lie like salt on the tongue.
Still, Heron wanted the Zerg Maiden to judge with will, not lean on power like a crutch in soft sand. If you depend too much on psychic force, what happens when the sea goes still? If Heron fully bottled her aura, how would the girl decide? Start a fight and beat the truth out of her like dust from a rug?
Heron wanted her to grow a spine for right and wrong, a blade that rings true in night wind. This time, a hint of spirit-scent had helped. Next time, it wouldn’t. That towering psychic strength was only a tool, a hammer, not the hearth-fire you live by.
Heron held a bold thought like a spark cupped in the palm: pass down Aether to the Zerg Maiden. But first, she had to make the girl feel, in bone and marrow, that psychic force wasn’t the sun at noon. Only then could she accept that Aether was the pole star.
“What I said wasn’t false, either,” Heron added, voice low as fog over reeds. “I just chose a more jaded tone. After that country grew strong, some places started walking backward like crabs at dusk. It hurts to say it, but limits are part of every civilization’s winter frost.”
She shook her head and sighed, a wind through bamboo.
She’d chosen a bitter mask, yes, yet her words weren’t smoke. They matched the country’s reflection on a dark river. Such laugh-or-cry scenes bloom like weeds everywhere. Other nations with similar scars face it too, but here the thorns grew thicker.
At first, Heron looked away from such thorns, eyes on the far mountains. When a group grows vast as a forest—or a nation—it can’t prune every branch. Solving it all would drink blood and treasure like a thirsty horse. Back then, the country was still climbing, every breath needed for the next ledge.
Once, Heron believed it wasn’t refusal but triage, not apathy but wintering for spring. Bigger fires to fight, bigger tides to cross.
“Mother, why wear the mask of a hotheaded youth?” The Zerg Maiden tilted her head like a bird studying rain. “With your rank and strength, you’re not that bitter voice. Was your old civilization really as shabby as you say?”
Heron had told her this was a people that dared to resist, thunder under a quiet sky. In the girl’s white-paper heart, that old nation sat high like a mountain peak. Even now, she honored those bright traits like lanterns in the snow.
If they were that brave, they should lead the country forward like a river to the sea. Why overturn the board, Mother, instead of folding those nations and peoples into a gentler dawn?
“First—great as they were, greatness doesn’t grant endless spring,” Heron said, a smile light as morning mist. “They’d walked too long on the road of wax and wane, rise and fall, like tides clawing the same shore. The nation, the people, the whole civilization—feet stuck in old ruts.”
“In my country, there’s a line, old as moss on stone: long divided must unite, long united must divide. It’s like a spell, binding the feet of a runner. The whole civilization marched to that drumbeat, a loop like a snake swallowing its tail.”
Civilization shouldn’t calcify. The world’s beauty comes from paths branching like cherry limbs, heading toward countless dawns. But the civilization Heron knew had stepped into a whirlpool. When you lag behind, the state shifts like ice breaking; the people brew their own storms.
Many civilizations cross that pass. Heron’s did not. Falling behind, they drove forward with iron teeth, ready to sacrifice the “few” like leaves to feed a fire. From the eagle’s height, it looked right.
But history had already carved warnings in stone, rain-slick and clear. Once you make a habit of offering up someone else’s share—once “don’t split the pie” becomes the excuse—it’s a sad winter.
“Midway through that rise, the cracks already spidered the glaze,” Heron said, palm flicking as if shooing smoke. “No one stopped to look, not even with enemies at the gate. Rot inside a beam brings down the hall. Pressure doesn’t forge you forever; it can grind you into silt.”
The old civilization fell into a fever for forward, forward, forward, like drums that never stopped. People saw the harvest’s shine but not the soil’s fatigue. Worse—those drums kept beating.
When momentum turns to monsoon, no single person can halt the rain. Heron realized mending holes wouldn’t save the ship. It was a sail patched to rags, limping toward a cliff. More patches bought only a few more steps—still toward the fall.
Even ten thousand sages holding up the sky couldn’t turn that fate like a river’s bend.
“Some will call this my private fantasy,” Heron said, a smile curving like a crescent moon. “So what? The newborn civilization I’ve launched like a star across night is proof enough. If anyone wants to deny me, let them first deny a living dawn. Do to the new what I did to the old.”
“If you want me as your foe, at least bring a will that can deny a civilization like thunder splits a tree. Without that, you’re not even fit to carry my shoes in the mud. A strong one’s enemy must be a matching mountain. Not just strength like Aether’s flame, but a person who can, by self alone, do the more-than-mortal. That’s strength, like iron under velvet.”
“As for ‘assimilating’ that civilization? No. Better to level the field and sow anew, than keep old chaff in the grain. Let the dregs turn to dust in the wind. In future days, people will embroider the past with soft light. Fine. I kept the worthy culture like pearls in a new setting.”
Assimilation never entered her plan. Look at the newborn civilization—new from root to leaf, leaping past old limits like a stag over a fallen wall. What’s wrong with that? There’s an old line I accept: history is written by the victors, like ink on conquering banners.
The Zerg Maiden sighed like reeds bowing to dusk and accepted Heron’s way, wave yielding to tide.
It wasn’t about better or worse. She’d been born in this new age, schooled by Heron’s careful hand like a sapling trained along a trellis. Such shaping slips into the grain; it’s hard to fight a river with bare hands.
“If one day you raise a banner against me,” Heron murmured, stroking the girl’s hair like smoothing a raven wing, “and it’s for a better civilization, I’ll have no grievance—like snow melting without regret.”
The Zerg Maiden lunged forward and hugged Heron tight, like a fledgling diving into a warm nest, burying her face in that quiet harbor of arms.
